Shen Yun dance company and its secretive parent, Falun Gong, investigated

This Friday, March 8, 2019, photo shows the Falun Gong Dragon Springs compound in Otisville, N.Y. After years of additions, the lakeside site features Tang Dynasty-style buildings close by modern, boxy buildings that would fit into a contemporary office park. Dragon Springs said 100 people, mostly students, live there. | Julie Jacobson/AP

WARWICK, N.Y.—A tall Chinese temple looms over the small Hudson Valley town of Warwick, N.Y. The temple is the centerpiece of a sprawling and secretive school/dormitory complex for Falun Gong, which the People’s Republic of China notes is a cult that sponsors the Shen Yun dance company.

Shen Yun troupes tour the world, infusing classical Chinese dance with propaganda skits against the Chinese government and socialism. The dance company is particularly active now that we are approaching the big annual holiday season for shows.

Falun Gong is also in legal trouble with both New York state and the federal government. But the advertising for the dance company doesn’t tell you that.

While the temple is the centerpiece of Falun Gong’s sprawling complex near Warwick, the reality is different. The complex includes the Fei Tian Academy of the Arts for training and schooling Shen Yun dancers. But when the dancers go out on tour, they often don’t get paid.

“Fei Tian students aren’t employees and as such cannot be paid salaries,” the dance company told the Epoch Times. Like Shen Yun, that paper is a Falun Gong enterprise. So is New Tang Dynasty TV, a cable channel.

Many former Shen Yun dancers told the New York Times they were not paid at all in their first year on tour. By their early to mid-20s, most were being paid $12,000 a year or less.

The federal minimum wage of $7.25 hourly works out to $15,080 for a year of 40-hour weeks. But many of the ex-dancers told the paper’s probers their workweeks were far longer than that—with no overtime pay.

The New York Labor Department is investigating other abuses at the Warwick complex and in the dance company, the Times reported. The prime one is using underage performers—the teenage dancers—without seeking, and receiving, a DOL permit for their employment.

Shen Yun finally got one this year, after the paper’s exposé. It mandates the dance company report to the state every month about underage performers and get a new permit every month.

But both the dance company and Falun Gong maintain the dancers are “students” at their academy, not “employees” under labor law. That’s important. Under current National Labor Relations Board rulings, college student workers, such as the Shen Yun dancers are “employees” with the right to unionize and bargain over working conditions, though a Republican-majority board appointed by incoming President Trump could reverse that.

Complaints about lack of pay finally prompted the New York State Labor Department to open an investigation of the dance troupe earlier this year, after a multi-part New York Times expose blew the cover off the secretive Shen Yun and Falun Gong’s abuses.

Abuse for more than a decade

Those abuses have lasted for more than a decade, the Times reported. But, according to a state audit almost ten years ago, the state Labor Department cannot act on its own but only respond to complaints it receives. And it didn’t get any until the Times’s stories hit the pages nationwide.

But some of the abuses the Times revealed aren’t legally covered.

The Times and other sources reported that “an atmosphere of fear” and isolation of the students-turned-dancers are a big abuse. There are also threats that individual dancers would “go to hell” for mistakes they make and there is a lack of proper medical care for on-the-job injuries.

Ben Hurley, an Australian who left Falun Gong after a dozen years as a member, reported four years ago that even then—three years after his initial blog about it—he got reports from once-scared members.

“The stories express a mix of excitement and terror,” Hurley wrote on the Religion and Ethics website after the Australian Broadcasting Corp. ran its own exposé of Falun Gong. “Excitement that they can now listen to pop music, or eat sashimi, or have a beer, or have sex, or take up a hobby, or hang out with non-believers—without feeling filthy and unworthy.

“And lingering terror as they face up to their living god, and attempt to banish him from their minds and out of their lives.”

That living god is Falun Gong’s founder, Li Hongzhi. “A number of people labored over the decision to contact me before finally plucking up the courage because they believed that Li could read their minds,” Hurley wrote.

It’s not the only belief Li fosters in Falun Gong.

“The ABC portrays Falun Gong as a threat to public safety due to its dangerous teachings on medicine, and that it is secretive and dishonest. Foreign Correspondent and Background Briefing”—the two Australian programs that ran ABC’s exposes—“both rejected such a characterization of its coverage.”

The two Australian programs said “They simply gave critics an opportunity to be heard and Falun Gong a fair opportunity to respond. But from my perspective, after being a staunch follower for 12 years, such a characterization would be accurate.”

Other Falun Gong beliefs promulgated by its founder are “gay people being disgusting, interracial children have no heaven to go to, and aliens are slowly taking over human bodies—not to mention the less-publicized, but widely-held, belief that Donald Trump is an angel from heaven.”

And that may be a problem for the U.S. Justice Department, especially after Trump takes it over in January when he enters the White House again.

Charged in money-laundering crypto scheme

“Just days after Trump was found guilty” in a New York courtroom of multiple counts of violating state campaign finance laws, the Justice Department “arrested and charged the CFO of the far-right newspaper Epoch Times in a $67 million money-laundering crypto scam,” SFist reported.

“The Epoch Times, of course, promotes and helps fund the ubiquitously advertised propaganda dance show Shen Yun.”

The dance company’s ads are ubiquitous at bus stops, on media, and on billboards in major U.S. cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., promoting its performances.

The dance company, technically a non-profit organization, got a tax break from New York State years ago to construct the Warwick complex. But it doesn’t pay for the ads, even though the New York Times revealed its annual revenue totaled $265 million last year.

Instead, the ad money comes from the Epoch Times plus local chapters of Falun Gong scattered around the U.S. The Epoch Times itself doesn’t want to pay full freight for its ads, according to one newspaper advertising rep who, under a pseudonym, posted her experience with the paper’s ad buyer on Reddit.

The buyer claimed that as a non-profit organization, Shen Yun should get a 50% discount. After an increasingly testy hour-long discussion, the paper’s ad rep walked away from the sale.

Propaganda against the People’s Republic of China infiltrates the Shen Yun dance itself, Gia Tolentino reported in a long expose in The New Yorker. Many audience members seemed to realize it, a survey of postings on Reddit and other social media shows, and discounted it. Nevertheless, it looms.

“A man came onstage to sing a song in Chinese, which was translated on the screen behind him. ‘We follow Dafa, the Great Way,’ he began, singing about a Creator who saved mankind and made the world anew,” the New Yorker story said.

“Atheism and evolution are deadly ideas. Modern trends destroy what makes us human,” he sang. “In the final dance number, a group of followers, who wore blue and yellow and clutched books of religious teachings, battled for space in a public square with corrupt youth.

“Their corruption was evident because they were wearing black, looking at their cell phones, and, in the case of two men, holding hands,” wrote Tolentino.

“Chairman Mao appeared, and the sky turned black. The city in the digital backdrop was obliterated by an earthquake and then finished off by a Communist tsunami. A red hammer and sickle glowed in the center of the wave. Dazed, I rubbed my eyes and saw a huge, bearded face disappearing in the water.

“’Was that…?’ I said to my brother, wondering if I needed to go to the hospital.

“’Karl Marx?’ he said. ‘Yeah, I think that was a tsunami with the face of Karl Marx.’”

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CONTRIBUTOR

Mark Gruenberg

Award-winning journalist Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.